When legislators request money for their districts, that doesn’t come in the form of a bill — it’s just an amendment to the monolithic budget bill introduced in the House and Senate each year. Even Richmond Sunlight doesn’t track those requests, since they’re not bills. Fortunately, there’s a way to get this information. LIS provides this data for both chambers, listing each legislators’ appropriation requests. (Unfortunately, it’s in a really difficult-to-syndicate format, so I’ve had a tough time integrating it into Richmond Sunlight.) Also, the House Appropriations Committee provides budget allocation reports for every house district as PDFs. Anybody interested in our budget — and it is a budget year, after all — will want to keep an eye on these resources.
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It’s not an easy task if you’ve never tried to do it before. Finding RFK Stadium in D.C. without a map might be an easier process.
No, it’s not at all simple. I seriously doubt that an average citizen wishing to learn about the proposed budget would be able to locate it.
Which brings me to my questions: Why not? And what can we do about making it thus?
Seriously, who do we talk to to lobby a better interface for GA and extended legislative and legislator information?
Providing it, which the government is required to do, is not satisfied by hiding it in pages on the LIS website. We talked about this earlier this year, Waldo, in terms of even finding the appropriations bill and the contents listed by legislator.
The situation is further complicated from the fact that the Senate Finance Committee has its own website, http://sfc.state.va.us, which is even more labrynthine.